First published in Great Britain in 2019

by Electric Monkey, an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2019 Kevin Brooks

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2019

ISBN 978 1 4052 9391 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 1825 7

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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true adj 1 in accordance with fact or reality; not false, wrong, or made up 2 faithful; constant; agreeing with reality

false adj 1 not based on reality; untrue or incorrect 2 intended to deceive; artificial; illusory

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

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Acknowledgement

Back series promotional page

1

My name is Kenzie Clark.

I’m eighteen years old now (it was my birthday last month), and sometimes I forget that my last day of normality – the last day of my life as a relatively ordinary girl – was only two years ago. It doesn’t feel like two years. It feels like a lifetime, like I’ve been like this for ever. And sometimes, when I think back to the days before the horror, I find it almost impossible to remember the ‘me’ I used to be – the child, the teenager, the girl who wasn’t like this. It’s as if she never existed. I’ll be lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, trying to picture her . . . trying to remember how she looked, how she was, how she felt about things . . . and nothing of her will come to me.

All I’ll see is all I am.

A faceless face, eyeless eyes, a skull, bones, blood . . .

All I am.

A lot of my memories of the day it happened are either shattered beyond recognition or buried so deeply that I doubt they’ll ever come back, but I know it was a rain-sodden Sunday – I remember getting soaked when I went to the corner shop to get Dad’s newspaper – and I’m fairly sure that it started out as just another day.

I would have got up at the usual time – around seven o’clock – and before doing anything else I would have checked on Finch, my younger brother, just as I did every morning. We shared a bedroom, so all I had to do to make sure he was okay was get out of bed and shuffle across to his side of the room. If he was still asleep I would have left him, and if he was awake, which he usually was, I would have asked him how he was doing and if there was anything he needed – water, the toilet, any painkillers or anything. I can’t recall how he was that morning, but I’m pretty sure I’d remember if it had been one of his really bad days, because that was the only time he ever showed how much he was suffering. The rest of the time he kept it to himself, and most mornings he’d just give me a tired smile and tell me he was fine.

I can still hear his voice sometimes . . .

Hey, Kez . . .

. . . all weak and croaky.

How’s it going?

And always that smile . . . the one just for us. Like a momentary light in the gloom.

The day would have passed like any other Sunday – looking after Finch, helping Dad with the housework . . . cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing, sorting out my school clothes for tomorrow. I probably had some homework to do – I usually left it till Sunday – and I know for sure that as the day wore on I would have started feeling worse and worse about going to school on Monday. Not because of the homework – I never had any problems with that – but simply because of all the crap I was going through back then. The nastiness, the taunts, the lies . . . the sickening knot that twists in your stomach when you see the faces you don’t want to see . . . and you know you should just ignore it all – it’s nothing, they’re nothing . . . it’s a waste of time even thinking about them . . .

But you can’t help it, can you?

It hurts.

You’d think it wouldn’t bother me so much anymore. Now that I’m like this – and being like this is a thousand times worse than anything I had to put up with before – you’d think all the hurt that I went through back then would have paled into insignificance. But it doesn’t work like that. It’d be nice if it did – it might have given me a small crumb of comfort now and then – but it doesn’t.

I was alone in the house with Finch when it happened.

One of the reasons I know it was a Sunday is that Dad wasn’t home that evening. Sunday nights were his ‘night off’, which meant that as long as Finch was relatively okay Dad would leave the house around seven o’clock and head off to the George and Dragon. It was his local pub, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away, and he’d been a regular there for years. He was in the darts team, the pool team, the quiz team . . . he’d even played in goal for the pub’s football team a couple of times. He didn’t drink very much – I don’t think I ever saw him drunk – he just liked being in the pub, being with his pub-friends, being what he used to be before it all went wrong. He used to go to the pub at least two or three times a week when Mum was still here and Finch wasn’t so bad, but since then he’d gradually cut it down to just the one night. I can’t remember when – or why – the one-night-a-week had become Sunday-night-only, but by the time of that rain-sodden Sunday two years ago, the routine was always the same. At six-thirty Dad would stop whatever he was doing. At six-forty he’d have a shower and change into his going-out clothes – jeans, polo shirt, fleece if it was cold. At six-fifty he’d check on Finch to make sure he was okay, then he’d have a few quick words with me – Call me if you need me, I’ll be back by twelve – and off he’d go.

I can’t really remember what I did between seven and nine o’clock that night. There’s a picture in my mind that shows me sitting at the kitchen table doing my homework, but I don’t know if it’s a true memory or just something I’ve imagined so many times that it’s become my truth. Not that it makes any difference. Wherever I was, and whatever I was doing, I know – I know – that at nine o’clock I was sitting on my bed staring stupidly at my phone.

My memory of that moment is seared into my mind.

I was sitting with my back against the wall, my knees drawn up to my chest, and the clock on my phone read 21:02. My thumb was hovering over the yapTee icon (yapTee was the messenger app that we all used back then), and a pulse was throbbing in the back of my head.

They’re nothing, I kept telling myself. They’re not even worth thinking about . . .

But the ever-tightening knot in my stomach told me otherwise.

‘Why don’t you just get rid of it?’ I heard Finch say.

I looked over at him. He was half sitting up in his bed, a paperback book in his hand.

‘Get rid of what?’ I said to him.

He just smiled. He knew that I knew what he meant. He’d been telling me to keep off yapTee ever since all the nasty stuff had started. He couldn’t understand why I kept looking at it when I knew what I’d find, and I knew it would make me feel terrible.

I couldn’t understand it either.

‘You should get rid of all of them,’ Finch said. ‘Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat . . . just shut them all down. You don’t need them, do you?’

‘Well, no . . . but –’

‘Give it to me,’ he said, holding out his hand for my phone. ‘I’ll do it for you.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I’m putting it away now anyway.’ I shut off the phone and put it in the pocket of my hoodie. ‘See? It’s gone . . . easy.’

‘Yeah, but it’s still all there, isn’t it?’ He smiled again. ‘Come on, Kez, just give me the phone . . . it won’t take a minute. You know I’m right, don’t you? I’m always right. That’s why . . .’ His smile suddenly faded and his voice became urgent. ‘What’s the matter, Kenzie? Kenzie? What’s going on?’

I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that everything felt wrong – my skin, my head, my hands, my eyes . . . everything felt like nothing I’d ever felt before. Every cell in my body – inside and out – was shivering, tingling, burning, freezing . . . hot and cold together . . . clammy and sick . . . electric . . .

Indescribable.

Jagged flashes were cracking through my skull – shapes and sounds together – and the room was melting and spinning . . . there but not there, sizeless, whirling . . .

The air was a roar of silence.

Beyond silence.

I could hear a voice – deep and slow, distorted . . . the nightmare voice of a giant – and it was coming to me from nowhere and everywhere, from a million miles away and no distance at all, the sound of it soaking into me through my skin . . .

It was Finch.

I know that now. He told me later that as he’d tried to help me – scrambling out of bed and into his wheelchair, wheeling himself across the room – he’d kept on calling out to me, screaming and yelling at the top of his voice, but no matter how loudly he’d shouted, I’d just sat there on the bed, my head in my hands, oblivious to everything.

‘It was really scary,’ he told me. ‘Your face, your hands . . . there was this weird kind of shimmery paleness to your skin, like a . . . I don’t know . . . like a milkiness. Or a cloudiness or something. Like your skin was floating.’

He also told me that just as he reached me, just as he was manoeuvring his wheelchair alongside the bed, I suddenly groaned, doubling over and clutching my belly, and a moment later I scrabbled off the bed, almost falling over as I got to my feet, and the next thing he knew I was stumbling across the room – stooped over, still clutching my belly – then lurching out through the door and along the landing towards the bathroom.

I don’t remember that.

I remember being in the bathroom though – bent over the sink, retching and heaving, my ice-cold face streaming with hot sweat. My insides were wracked with a strange swell of nausea that kept surging up into my throat then erupting into nothing, so all I kept doing was sicking up gobs of horrible brown phlegmy stuff. And every time the sickness surged, and every time I retched, a wrenching pain ripped through my belly. And all the time my skin was shivering and prickling . . . hot but not hot, cold but not cold . . . and my head was still crashing with electric madness, flashing and cracking with bolts of black lightning . . . and then all at once, just for a moment, everything seemed to stop – no movement, no sound, no pain, no time – and all I can remember is staring down at my hands as they gripped the sides of the sink, wondering distantly why my fingers were as white as the porcelain . . .

Then out of nowhere a sudden massive spasm shot right through me, and as I jerked upright – my back stretched tight – I came face to face with a nightmare vision staring back at me from the mirror above the sink. A skull, skinless . . . white bone, grinning teeth . . .

It wasn’t me.

It was a human skull.

Faceless, stripped . . .

Muscled red . . .

It couldn’t be me.

But it was moving with me . . . turning as I turned, leaning closer to the mirror with me, its lipless mouth dropping open in horror with mine . . .

And it had my hair.

It had my stupid dyed-black hair . . .

It wasn’t real. I knew that. There was something wrong with me, that was all. I was sick, feverish, hallucinating . . . my head was all messed up. All I had to do was close my eyes and take a few deep breaths . . .

I closed my eyes.

Nothing happened.

I could still see.

I opened my eyes and closed them again, squeezing them shut as tightly as possible . . . but it didn’t make any difference. I could still see. And I realised then that I was seeing through my closed eyelids . . .

The skull in the mirror opened its mouth and screamed.

2

As far as I know, the only time I was actually unconscious over the next few days was just after I’d screamed in the bathroom. There wasn’t a lock on the door, and when Finch had heard me screaming he’d rushed in after me and found me lying on the floor with my eyes closed. There was a smear of blood on the wall above me, so I think I must have staggered backwards from the sink and collapsed, cracking my head against the tiled wall as I fell.

When I asked Finch how I looked when he found me, he said I was incredibly pale and drenched in sweat, but apart from that I looked reasonably normal.

‘Normal for you, anyway,’ was how he put it.

I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few minutes though, because when I came round Finch had only just called for an ambulance. He’d called Dad too, but for some reason he hadn’t answered, and Finch had had to leave a message. Not that I was aware of any of this at the time . . . at least, not in the usual sense of ‘being aware’.

It’s very hard to describe my state of awareness when all this was happening. I wasn’t actually unconscious, but I wasn’t fully conscious either. I was aware of things going on – I could see, I could hear, I could feel – but it was as if everything was happening in a different world, a world I didn’t belong to, and there was some kind of invisible and incomprehensible barrier between me and this world that wouldn’t allow me to connect with it. And sometimes it wasn’t just the world that was different. Sometimes it was me. I never stopped being myself, and I never stopped experiencing things as myself, but sometimes that self was a stranger . . . a ‘me’ I didn’t know.

And there were other times . . .

It’s hard.

All I can do is tell you what I remember.

Dad turned up just as I was being stretchered into the ambulance. I remember his face looming over me – panic and fear in his eyes, the smell of beer on his breath – and I remember him reaching out to me, his arm turning elastic, stretching down from the sky, a giant hand with giant fingers reaching down to crush my head . . .

A voice spoke.

The hand went away.

The rain was silver in the night.

I was taken to the local hospital at first – Burgess Park General, or BPG as it’s known – a sprawling maze of ugly grey buildings just off the bypass on the outskirts of town. I’d been there so many times with Finch over the years that when the ambulance arrived and the paramedics transferred me to a trolley bed and started wheeling me inside, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t there. I kept asking the medics where he was, telling them that we had to wait for him, that he’d probably just gone to the toilet or something . . .

No one seemed to hear me though.

It wasn’t until later that I realised the reason that no one could hear me was that I wasn’t actually saying anything. Something inside me was speaking out loud, and I could hear my voice coming out of me, but my lips weren’t moving, and wherever the words were coming from, they died when they hit the invisible barrier that separated me from the other world, popping like soap bubbles against a wall of glass.

The barrier affected sounds coming from this other world too, but not in the same way. I could still hear the sounds all around me – voices, footsteps, the soft beeping of monitors – but most of it was distorted. It was as if each different sound had been taken apart and put back together again before reaching my ears, but they hadn’t been put back together properly, so they didn’t sound how they should. I could hear people talking to each other, for example, and I could hear them when they were talking to me – asking me questions, trying to tell me something – but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Their words were so garbled and warped that they barely sounded like words at all.

I remember being wheeled along hospital corridors – lying on my back, staring up at the ceiling, watching the lights rushing past – and at one point I was wheeled into a big silver lift, and as the doors closed and the lift lurched upwards, I was vaguely aware of a babble of voices talking urgently about something. The lift stopped, the voices continued – and I think the doors stayed closed – then I felt the lift lurch again and we carried on going up.

Then more corridors.

Fewer people.

Less noise.

And into a white room.

In physical terms, I wasn’t feeling anything now. No sickness, no pain. I wasn’t hot. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t even numb. I wasn’t anything. My entire body, inside and out, had become something beyond description. There but not there. Mine but not mine. Without feeling, but not without sense. It knew when the doctors and nurses were doing things to it – sticking needles into it, attaching sensors, prodding and poking it about – and somehow it passed on something of this awareness to me. But there was no feeling involved. Just a sense of happening.

I knew it wasn’t right.

Nothing about this was right.

And the doctors knew it too. I could tell from their increasingly troubled eyes, and the way they were beginning to behave around me – uncertain, hesitant, almost fearful at times. There was something seriously wrong with me. They knew it. But they had no idea what it was, or what to do about it.

I don’t know what time it was when my skin started shivering and prickling again, but it must have been past midnight, maybe even two or three in the morning. The room was quiet – dead-of-night quiet – and the only thing I could hear was the muted presence of one of the doctors who was standing at my bedside taking readings from the monitors. She was one of the doctors who’d been there since I arrived – a serious-looking middle-aged woman with tired eyes and a downturned mouth.

I could feel everything tightening inside me now, and I knew my body was going to spasm again, just as it had in the bathroom. I tried calling out to the doctor, but it was hopeless. I just couldn’t get any words out. And a moment later it was too late anyway.

The convulsion was more violent this time – the spasm crashing through me like an electric shock, the sudden massive jolt almost lifting me off the bed – but it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, and the next thing I knew I was just lying there on my back, my heart beating hard, and the doctor was staring down at me with a look of sheer horror in her eyes.

I knew what she was staring at.

The horror in her eyes was the same horror I’d felt when I’d seen my skull in the bathroom mirror.

It didn’t take long for one of the other doctors to arrive – I think he was the most senior one, the one in charge – but I could tell from the way the woman was urging him to hurry up that I was already beginning to look normal again. I could feel it too. The prickliness in my skin had faded to a fluctuating tingle. I can’t have changed back completely though, because when the other doctor came over to the bed and looked down at me, it was obvious that he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He wasn’t quite as shocked as the woman had been, and as the tingle in my skin became more and more faint, his stunned expression gradually gave way to a look of utter bewilderment.

He’d seen enough though. Enough to believe the woman when she told him what she’d seen – her sombreness deserting her as she jabbered away at him, frantically waving her hands about and pointing at my head – and enough for him to realise that drastic steps had to be taken.

An hour or so later I was wheeled out of the room, then along the corridors again, into the lift, down to the ground floor, and out into a waiting ambulance.

3

I’m not sure if I was given a sedative of some kind before leaving BPG, or if I was just so tired that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. But whatever the reason, I slept for most of the ambulance journey. It wasn’t a normal sleep. It was that twilight sort of sleep you get when you’re just dozing off – neither fully asleep nor fully awake – and you can’t tell if the things you’re hearing and seeing in your mind are real or not. It doesn’t usually last very long – you either fall asleep completely or wake up – but this time the twilight didn’t go away. I could hear the wail of the siren, and I could see the sound of it too. It was a series of thin flat sheets, all of them electric blue, their flatness gently undulating as they sliced through a pure black emptiness. And I could hear, and sometimes see, the people in the back of the ambulance with me. One of them was the senior doctor, the other one looked just like my mum.

My mum died six years ago. I was twelve at the time, and Finch was eight.

The children we were died with her.

I know now that the ambulance journey didn’t take all that long – with the siren on and the emergency lights flashing it probably only took about half an hour – but my senses were so mixed up that minutes seemed like hours and hours seemed like minutes. For all I knew, I could have been in the ambulance for days.

The place I was taken to seemed like an ordinary hospital at first – a big grey building, long white corridors, people in hospital-type clothing – and it wasn’t until I’d been there for a while, and my strange sleepiness had begun to wear off, that I started to realise there was something different about it. The room I was put in, for example, had all the same stuff as my room at BPG – same hospital bed, same monitors and equipment, same tubes and wires all over the place – but it also had a CCTV camera on the wall, the lens pointing directly at me, and a swipe-card entry system on the door. If you didn’t have a key card, you couldn’t get in or out.

And another thing I realised was that I hadn’t seen any other patients. Or visitors. Just medical staff – doctors, nurses, porters . . .

I tried to think about it, to work out what it meant, but I was starting to feel really strange again, and I kept forgetting what I was thinking about. It was a different kind of strangeness now. Worse, far more intense. My whole body, everything about me, felt alien. Even the pain felt wrong. It was like a living thing growing inside me . . . a clawing spread of living hurt eating its way through my flesh. My skin felt sick – clammy, raw – and I could feel my muscles beginning to twitch. It wasn’t too bad at first – just a faint kind of fluttering beneath the skin, mostly in my arms and legs – but it rapidly got worse, and in no time at all my entire body was shuddering so violently that the bed was rattling beneath me. I tried to grab hold of something, desperately trying to steady myself, but my arms didn’t belong to me any more . . . they were just there, shaking uncontrollably at my sides . . .

Something happened in my head then.

I still can’t remember exactly what it was.

A sound, perhaps . . . but not a sound.

The feeling of a sound.

A flash of black lightning?

No . . .

I don’t know.

All I can really remember is a sense of people hurrying into the room, a blur of voices – urgent but calm – then firm hands taking hold of my convulsing body. I couldn’t see who it was, because for some reason I couldn’t see anything at all. I didn’t understand it, but it was too much to think about. I was still shuddering and twitching, still wracked with pain . . .

I closed my eyes and tried not to feel anything.

After the shaking had eventually stopped, and after I’d opened my eyes and shut them again for at least the fiftieth time, I finally had to accept the truth.

I was blind.

I lost track of time after that.

I lost track of everything.

I remember floating – blind, paralysed, senseless, timeless – and I remember the hurt inside me, its blunt teeth grinding and wrenching . . . and the cold sickness in my bones . . . and the shearing pain of skin being stripped from flesh . . .

And I remember the nothingness too.

The nothingness of not knowing.

I didn’t know who I was or where I was or what was going on . . . I didn’t even know what I was. All I knew was the hurt. But at the same time there was something in an unknown part of me, something I can’t explain, that somehow knew – or at least sensed – what was happening to me. It knew there were at least two doctors working on me all the time – examining every inch of me, taking samples, measuring, scanning, listening, talking. It could sense their hands on my skin, their probing instruments, the stinging stab of their needles . . . and it knew all these things for what they were. But there were other things happening to me, other sensations, that it sensed without understanding. A soft and slightly ticklish feeling on the top of my head and the back of my neck . . . and later, in the same place, the gentle brushing of a hand. Movement . . . quiet and smooth . . . a rubbery hum . . . a machine starting up . . . something spinning around my head . . . the rapid whirr of an electric wheel . . . then silence again, and movement again . . . quiet and smooth . . . a rubbery hum . . . then more silence. A covering . . . a feeling of lightness being laid over my skin . . . arms, legs, body, face . . . a shroud so delicate it’s almost weightless . . . and then the same silky lightness being slipped onto my hands . . .

I slept and dreamed.

My body dreamed.

It was a dream of presence – no sight, no sound – just a knowing. It was in my every element – bone, blood, flesh – the knowing and the presence together. It was one thing and many things.

It was me – and somehow the possibility of something of me . . .

It was Finch – connected and disconnected . . .

And Mum – alone in a sad silence . . .

And her mum, my nan – old and blind, her blindness trailing through Mum’s heart to touch upon my eyes . . .

And there were others too – uncountable others, nameless but not unknown . . . mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters . . . a son, a brother . . .

Mothers and daughters.

They were me.

And I was them.

It was the silent scream that finally woke me.

I was dreaming a dream of spinning and whirling, going faster and faster all the time, and there was something inside me – a feeling in my chest – screaming silently for the spinning to stop. It was a feeling of life, this screaming thing, and the spinning was tearing it apart.

It didn’t want to die.

It screamed, desperate to break the silence.

The spinning roared.

The scream swelled, filling my lungs, my chest, my throat . . .

I couldn’t breathe.

I opened my mouth and screamed.

It wasn’t much of a sound – more like a strangled whimper than a scream – but it was enough to break me out of the dream and jerk me awake. I woke instantly, sitting bolt upright and gasping for breath, and I knew straight away that everything had changed. The different world had gone. There was no invisible barrier, no distortion, no sense of otherness.

I could hear normally again – voices, urgent movement, someone saying my name . . .

And I could see.

The room was dim, the light pale and low, but I could see my immediate surroundings. I could see the grey-haired man standing beside me, his hand reaching gently for my shoulder, and I could see the olive-skinned woman on the other side of the bed, leaning over to straighten out the bed sheet. The sheet wasn’t covering my feet, both of which were covered up by long white socks, and I could see that the sock on my right foot had slipped down and was half hanging off . . .

I could see.

And in the moment before the sheet was pulled down over my feet, the moment before the grey-haired man began easing me back down to the bed, I saw a flash of red . . .

The red of meat.

4

‘Can you hear me, Kenzie? Can you understand what I’m saying?’

I was lying in the bed, staring up at the grey-haired man and the olive-skinned woman as they stood there looking down at me. I felt utterly exhausted. Bone-tired and drained. And my body was aching all over. It was the kind of ache you get when your body’s been through a battering – dull and bruised, wearying . . . but not painful.

I didn’t hurt anymore.

‘Kenzie?’ the woman said. ‘Can you tell us how you’re feeling?’

I had no pain, no sickness, no fever. But I knew I wasn’t right. My skin felt wrong – cold, but not cold . . . clammy, shivery, prickly, raw . . . and the wrongness wasn’t just on my skin, it was in it . . . inside me . . . beneath the skin.

The top of my head felt different too.

And I seemed to be wearing long white gloves that reached up to my elbows . . .

‘If you can hear us, Kenzie,’ the grey-haired man said, ‘just nod your head, okay? We need to know –’

‘What’s the matter with me?’

My voice was a croaky whisper.

The man and the woman glanced at each other for a moment – sharing a look that I didn’t understand – then they both turned back to me.

‘Hi, Kenzie,’ the man said to me, smiling his doctor’s smile. ‘I’m Doctor Reynolds, and this is my colleague –’

‘What’s the matter with me?’ I repeated. ‘What’s going on? Why am I –?’

‘We’ll explain everything soon,’ he said calmly. ‘Your dad’s on his way here now. He won’t be long. We’ll tell you as much as we can when he gets here. In the meantime –’

I sat up suddenly, taking them both by surprise, and before they could do anything to stop me, I threw off the bed sheet, grabbed the hem of my gown, and yanked it up to reveal my feet and legs.

I think something in me knew what I was going to see, but however much I thought I knew, it was never going to make any difference. Nothing on earth could have prepared me for what I saw that day.

My feet and lower legs were covered by the knee-high white socks that I’d seen before, but with the gown pulled up to the tops of my thighs, the upper halves of my legs were visible. But they weren’t my legs anymore. They weren’t real . . . they couldn’t be. They were skinless, stripped . . . a gruesome vision of naked red muscle and sick-yellow globs and pinkish-white gristly things . . . and something of bone . . . two half-hidden white domes, one on each knee . . .

Knee caps.

No . . .

It couldn’t be.

I moved my right leg, cautiously raising my knee . . .

The skinless vision responded.

It was my leg.

That thing of meat and bone was me.

I closed my eyes, unable to look anymore . . . but nothing happened. I could still see. I could see through my closed eyes . . .

See through . . .

It couldn’t be real.

But it was.

I’m not sure what happened then. I vaguely remember a feeling of absolute blankness – no thoughts, no emotions . . . just a stupefied nothingness – but I don’t know if it was a natural reaction to the shock, my mind and body shutting me down, or if one of the doctors had given me something to calm me down. Either way though, the next thing I can remember is sitting up in bed, with the olive-skinned woman standing to my right, Doctor Reynolds perched on a chair to my left, and a woman I’d never seen before sitting in a chair beside him. She had short blonde hair and an eyebrow stud. An open notebook was resting in her lap.

The room was still very dim, and as I gazed slowly around – getting my first proper look at the place – I realised there weren’t any windows. There were lights fitted into the ceiling – four flat squares of whitish glass – but they were all turned off, and apart from the pale glow of the monitor screens, the only source of light I could see was a small LED panel fixed to the far wall. I stared at it for a moment, then closed my eyes . . .

I could still see it.

Nothing had changed.

‘How are you, Kenzie?’ I heard Doctor Reynolds say.

I turned and looked at him. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Your dad’s had to go back home, I’m afraid,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair. ‘There was a problem with your brother –’

‘What kind of problem?’ I said. ‘Is Finch all right? Has something happened to him?’

‘No, he’s fine,’ the doctor assured me. ‘It was just something to do with his carer, apparently . . . some kind of mix-up. Your dad had to go back to sort it all out.’

‘But Finch is definitely okay?’

He nodded. ‘And your dad’s hoping to get out here tomorrow.’

‘Does that mean you’re not going to tell me anything until then?’

Doctor Reynolds glanced at the woman beside him. She’d been watching me closely while I’d been talking, and at one point she’d scribbled something down in her notebook. She was still looking at me now – a serene steadiness showing in her eyes – and after a few moments’ silence, she leaned to one side a little, resting an elbow on the arm of the chair, and spoke to me in a measured tone.

‘Do you want to wait for your dad before we start telling you anything?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on mine.

‘Not if I don’t have to.’

‘Do you mind if I ask why?’

‘I can see inside myself,’ I told her. ‘I can see my own muscles, my bones . . . and when I close my eyes –’ I closed my eyes ‘– I can still see you.’ I opened my eyes and stared at her. ‘If all that was happening to you, would you want to spend another whole day waiting to find out what’s going on?’

The woman didn’t say anything for a while, she just sat there, gazing thoughtfully into my eyes. Eventually, she turned to Doctor Reynolds and gave him the slightest of nods. He nodded back, glanced across at the olive-skinned woman – who was adjusting something on one of the monitors – then he turned his attention back to me.

‘Right then, Kenzie,’ he said. ‘Let’s start with the simple stuff.’

5

The ‘simple stuff’ didn’t take very long. Dr Reynolds introduced himself again – his first name was John – and then he told me who the two women were. The olive-skinned woman was Dr Miriam Kamara, and the other one was Dr Shelley Hahn. Dr Reynolds then went on to explain where I was, and why I’d been brought here.

‘You’re in a specialised medical facility called the RDRT Centre,’ he told me. ‘RDRT stands for Rare Disease Research and Treatment. We’re about twenty miles north of London here, so you’re not too far from home. I’m the Centre’s Clinical Director, and Dr Kamara is Head of Physical Care.’

I looked at Dr Hahn.

‘I’m a clinical psychologist,’ she told me. ‘I work with the Centre’s Recovery and Evaluation team.’

I nodded.

She smiled.

Dr Reynolds went on. ‘We’re not the only Rare Disease Centre in the country,’ he explained, ‘but we’re the only one that undertakes both research and specialised treatment. Our treatment capacity is quite limited – we only have four special care rooms, including this one – but we only take on the very rarest of cases, so we don’t actually need any more beds. At the moment you’re our only patient.’

He paused for a second, sipping water from a plastic cup.

‘Any questions so far?’ he asked me.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘When are you going to tell me what’s wrong with me?’

He started by telling me what wasn’t wrong with me, which as far as I could tell was pretty much everything. I wasn’t suffering from a virus, or any kind of infection. My blood count was fine. Kidney function, liver function, heart . . . all okay. Toxicology test negative. X-rays and scans – CT and MRI – perfectly normal . . .

‘Some of your test results showed slightly abnormal readings,’ Dr Kamara said, taking over from Dr Reynolds, ‘but most of these can be put down to highly elevated levels of stress. In fact, given what you’ve been through, I’d be worried if you didn’t show signs of stress.’ She glanced at Dr Hahn, then turned back to me. ‘There are still a lot of tests that we haven’t done yet,’ she continued, ‘and we’re still waiting for the results of some we’ve already done, but so far it seems as if . . .’

She hesitated, her voice trailing off, and she looked over at Dr Reynolds.

‘How do you feel at the moment, Kenzie?’ he asked me, getting out of the chair and coming over to the bed.

‘Why can’t you just tell me –?’

‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ he said, moving aside to let Dr Hahn stand beside him. ‘But before I start, I need to know how you’re feeling.’

It’s hard to describe something that isn’t like anything else. If there’s nothing to compare it to, and there aren’t any words for it, it’s impossible to say what it’s really like. All you can do is get as close as you can. So that’s what I tried to do. But even after I’d done my best to describe the weird feeling in my skin – the uncold coldness, the clamminess, the tingling rawness of freshly scraped flesh – I knew I’d got nowhere near it.

‘Does it hurt?’ Dr Reynolds asked me.

‘No, not really . . . it just feels kind of . . . I don’t know . . .’

‘Unpleasant?’

‘A little bit, yeah.’

‘But it’s not painful.’

I shook my head. ‘It just feels wrong.’

He was looking closely at me now, his head angled to one side as he gazed intently at the side of my face, and as he leaned in a little closer – a sense of wonder showing in his eyes – I could feel the anger growing inside me. I’d had enough of this now – being gawped at, studied, examined, like I was some kind of experiment or something. I needed the truth . . . I needed to see myself . . . I needed to know . . .

I don’t know what I would have done if Dr Hahn hadn’t realised I was getting upset and given Dr Reynolds a discreet little nudge. Part of me was so desperate to see myself, to see the dreaded truth, that all I wanted to do was push Dr Reynolds away and rip off my gown and the long white gloves . . .

But another part of me was simply too terrified to do anything.

Dr Reynolds had responded to Dr Hahn’s nudge now, realising his mistake and straightening up so he wasn’t staring right into my face anymore.

‘Sorry, Kenzie,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean –’

‘Help me,’ I muttered. ‘Please . . . just help me.’

‘I’m afraid there’s only one way to do this, Kenzie,’ Dr Reynolds said. ‘I could tell you what’s happened to you, and I could try to prepare you for what you’re about to see, but nothing will really mean anything to you until you actually see it. Does that make sense?’

I nodded.

‘And besides,’ he added, ‘you’ve already got at least some idea of what to expect, haven’t you?’

I remembered the flash of red . . . skinless, stripped . . . and the skull in the bathroom mirror . . . faceless bone, grinning teeth . . .

What did I expect?

I don’t know.

I think I was probably hoping rather than expecting . . . hoping that what I was expecting proved to be wrong.

‘Are you okay to go ahead with this, Kenzie?’ Dr Hahn said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘If you want to stop at any point, for any reason, just tell us. All right?’

‘Yeah.’

She smiled at me, then turned to Dr Reynolds and nodded.

‘Could you adjust the lighting, please, Miriam?’ he said to Dr Kamara.

She went over to a control panel by the door and pressed one of the buttons. The LED light on the far wall dimmed, and the already gloomy room grew even darker.

‘Is that enough?’ she asked Dr Reynolds.

He looked at me, studying my face for a moment, then nodded to himself.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Just right.’

The light was so dim now that it was hard to see anything clearly, and as Dr Kamara came back over to the bed, and I gazed around at the monitor displays glowing palely in the dimness, I couldn’t make any sense of it.

‘Is that going to make any difference?’ I said to Dr Reynolds.

‘The light?’

‘Yeah. I mean, turning the light down isn’t going to change anything, is it?’

‘Well, actually . . .’ He paused, hesitating. ‘Look, I’m not trying to hide anything from you, Kenzie, it’s just that certain things are going to be a lot easier to explain, and easier to understand, when you know a bit more about your condition. I realise it’s all very confusing, but if I tried telling you now why we’ve dimmed the light, it would confuse things even more. You’ll find out soon enough though, and I give you my word on that. But for now I think it’s probably best if we concentrate on one thing at a time. Is that okay with you?’

I told him it was.

Then he asked me if I was ready.

And I told him I was, even though half of me wasn’t.

‘Miriam?’ he said.

As I turned to Dr Kamara, I saw that she was holding a clean white pillow in her hands.

‘I’m going to put this on your lap, Kenzie,’ she said. ‘Is that all right?’

I nodded.

‘You’ll have to move your hands, please.’

My white-gloved hands were loosely clasped together in front of me. I moved them out of the way, laying my arms at my sides, and Dr Kamara leaned across and carefully placed the pillow on my lap.

‘Is that okay?’ she asked. ‘Comfortable?’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘Good. Now all I want you to do is lay your left hand on top of the pillow. Like this . . .’

She showed me, leaning over and positioning her hand and lower arm along the length of the pillow, her palm face down.

‘All right?’ she said.

‘Yeah.’

She removed her hand and straightened up, and I copied what she’d done – left arm bent at the elbow, hand and lower arm resting on the pillow, palm face down. There was an ugliness to the way it looked – shrouded in the alien whiteness of the glove and the sleeve of the gown . . . it looked like something sick and dying.

‘I’m just going to roll up your sleeve now,’ Dr Kamara said, leaning over me again. ‘Could you lift your arm for me, please? Just a little bit . . . that’s it.’

She carefully rolled up the sleeve, stopping a few inches below my elbow – so my lower arm was still covered by the long white glove – then she gently replaced my hand on the pillow, straightened up again, and looked across at Dr Reynolds.

‘I’m going to show you your hand and your arm now, Kenzie,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll do it very slowly, okay? I’m going to lower the sleeve of the glove just a few inches at a time. If at any point you want me to stop, or you want to be covered up again, just tell me. I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. Is that all okay with you?’

I nodded.

‘Any questions before we start?’

‘Do you want me to hold out my arm or anything?’

He shook his head. ‘Just keep it on the pillow, right where it is.’

‘Okay.’

My voice sounded strange – weak and shaky, breathless, the words getting caught in my throat . . .

I watched in silence as Dr Reynolds made a few final adjustments to his position beside the bed, making sure he could comfortably reach my arm with both hands, and then – seemingly satisfied – he glanced round at the other two, gave them a nod, and turned back to me.

‘Ready?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah.’

He held my gaze for a moment longer, then reached over, took hold of the top of the glove, and carefully folded it down.

6

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the way I am, and even now there are still things I shudder to see, but if you live with your inner self for two long years – seeing the life inside you every single day – you can’t help growing to admire it. You might still hate it – or at least what it’s done to you – and you might not find it quite so grotesque anymore (though you know it’s still hideous to others), but at least you can appreciate its wonder. How do all those things inside me know what they’re doing? How do all those mindless lumps and blobs and tubes keep going? And if I have no control over them, which I don’t – I don’t even know what most of them actually do – who or what does control them?

I’ve also come to realise that no matter how I feel about the things inside me – whether it’s wonder or hatred or anything else – their only purpose is to keep me alive, and they do their job with such tireless devotion that it seems a bit heartless to hold anything against them.

Unless, of course, you don’t want to be kept alive.

But I’ll come to that later.

All I’m trying to say now is that it’s taken me a long time to even begin coming to terms with the way I am, and while that doesn’t really mean much more than being relatively okay with it most of the time, it’s a whole world away from the devastating horror and hopelessness that was all I had in the weeks and months after that day of revelation at the RDRT Centre.

And as for the revelation itself . . .

Words aren’t enough.

It was beyond words.

Beyond description.

Beyond all understanding.

Dr Reynolds was true to his word – he worked very slowly, taking his time, revealing my condition inch by inch, hand by hand, limb by limb . . . all the time checking with me to make sure I was still okay to go on, and pausing at regular intervals to let Dr Hahn look me over and decide whether or not I was too traumatised to continue.

The initial shock – the revelation of my lower arm, wrist, and eventually my hand – was tempered only slightly, if at all, by the fact that it wasn’t a complete surprise. I’d already seen the meat and muscle of the upper halves of my legs, and the half-hidden bone of my kneecaps . . . and I’d already seen my skull in the mirror too – faceless, skinless, screaming . . .

But this was different.

This was right here, right now, right in front of my eyes . . .

My arm and hand, skinless things of meat and muscle, the living redness framed in the white of the pillow.

And this time there was no doubting it.

My mind and my senses were perfectly clear. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t half crazy with pain. And I knew I wasn’t just seeing things, because when I looked up and gazed around at the three doctors, I could see the extraordinary truth in their eyes.

‘What is it?’ I managed to mutter, staring down at my hand. ‘What’s happened . . . my skin . . . what’s happened to my skin?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ Dr Reynolds admitted. ‘We’re looking into the possibility that it might be some kind of genetic disorder, but as far as we can tell there are no known records of any condition – genetic or otherwise – that presents with symptoms anything like yours, which basically means we’re looking for answers to questions that have never been asked before. And unfortunately that takes time.’

He stopped for a moment, watching closely as I tentatively moved my hand, turning it very slowly until the palm was facing up. It looked inhuman – like the inner workings of a demonic claw.

‘Try moving your fingers,’ Dr Reynolds said.

I waggled them a bit, then cautiously closed my hand, forming a loose fist. I held it for a second or two, then opened my hand again.

‘Did you see it?’ Dr Reynolds asked.

‘See what?’

‘If you look very hard you can just about see the outline of your skin. It’s incredibly faint, and it’s only really visible when you move. But it’s definitely there.’

I tried again, this time moving more freely, and after a few moments I saw what he meant – an almost imperceptible flickering of hand- and finger-shaped outlines, barely more than fleeting shimmers, like the outline of a glass hand in crystal-clear water.

‘It’s pure transparency,’ Dr Reynolds said, unable to keep a whisper of awe and admiration from his voice as he gazed at my hand. He carried on staring at it for a few moments, then gave a little shake of his head and turned to me. ‘There’s doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong with your skin, or any other affected tissue. Every test we’ve done shows that the structure and function of the transparent cells is perfectly normal. Of course, I realise that’s of no consolation to you, but –’

‘Am I like this all over?’ I said.

He froze for a second, his eyes blinking and his mouth half open, and that was all the answer I needed.

I didn’t look at everything that day – there were parts of me that I simply couldn’t bear to see – but I saw more than enough to confirm the unthinkable truth. The skin of my entire body was transparent.

I knew very little about human anatomy then, so I couldn’t put a name to a lot of the things I saw, but as more and more of my inner self was revealed, the more it seemed that most of it looked much the same.

Muscle . . .

Flat bands of fibrous red, the redness blotched with the dull yellow shine of fat.

The pale gristle of cartilage.

And in places with little or no covering of muscle – knuckles, knees – the shadowy white presence of bone.

And I seem to remember that it was this – this basic sameness of my inner body’s landscape – that drifted into my mind as I gazed down numbly at the skinless vision of my belly.

At least, I remember thinking . . . at least you can’t see any deeper inside yourself.

Imagine that . . .

Imagine the horrors lying in wait beneath that canopy of muscle.

And it was then – just as that very thought came to me – that Dr Reynolds made another revelation.

7

Dr Reynolds kept it as simple as possible. Partly, I think, because he assumed – correctly – that I wasn’t in the right state of mind to deal with anything too complicated, but also because – as he freely admitted – he barely understood it himself. All he really knew, and all he could really tell me, was that it wasn’t just my skin that was transparent, but that other soft tissue was affected as well, and that the extent of the transparency – the degree to which it could penetrate my body – was dependent on the level of light I was exposed to.

‘So, for example,’ he said. ‘In this kind of light . . .’ he gestured vaguely at the surrounding dimness ‘. . . the transparency doesn’t generally reach beyond the superficial layer of muscles. It seems to penetrate further in some places, but that’s only because some places are closer to the body’s surface than others, so the light doesn’t have so far to travel. The one exception to all this is your bones. It seems that no matter how close to the surface they are, or how bright the light is, your bones aren’t affected by the transparency.’

He paused for a second, glancing round at Dr Kamara who I realised had moved across to the control panel by the door again. He gave her a quick nod, then turned back to me.

‘When the intensity of the light is lowered . . .’ he said, waiting as the light in the room grew even dimmer, ‘. . . well, you can see for yourself what happens.’

My belly was still exposed, and as I looked down at it again, it was immediately obvious that something had changed. I could still see inside myself, but not as much – not as deeply – as before. A few strips of muscle were still showing here and there, but the bulk of it – the covering of fibrous red bands that had been so visible before – was itself now covered by the layers of tissue above it. Most of this covering was a thinnish coat of fat – a vile-looking yellow jelly that was simply too sickening to look at.

I swallowed hard, took a few steadying breaths, then turned back to Dr Reynolds.

‘What happens if there’s no light at all?’ I asked him.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if it’s too dark to see anything at all . . . well, obviously, if we can’t see anything, we can’t see anything. And if we use a torch, or any other kind of light – no matter how faint – you won’t be in total darkness anymore, which defeats the whole point of the exercise.’

‘How bad does it get?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, if the light’s really bright . . . it’s going to get worse, isn’t it? That’s why you dimmed the lights before showing me anything, so I wouldn’t see all the really bad stuff straight away.’

‘We were just being cautious, Kenzie,’ Dr Hahn said. ‘If we’d shown you too much at first, it might have been too much of a shock.’

‘I need to see it,’ I said. ‘I need to know . . .’

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded. ‘If I don’t see it, I’ll just keep thinking about it.’

‘You’re going to keep thinking about it anyway, I’m afraid.’

‘Yeah, but at least I’ll know what I’m thinking about.’

She smiled at me, but it was the kind of smile that’s too fragile to hold, and by the time she’d turned to Dr Reynolds it had disappeared without a trace. She didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t speak either. He just nodded, then looked back at me.

‘We’ll do it gradually again,’ he said. ‘Just like before. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll ask Dr Kamara to start turning up the lights. We’ll begin with the small one on the wall, and if you still want to keep going when it reaches full brightness, we can start fading up one of the main ceiling lights. Is that all right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We can slow things down or stop completely whenever you want.’

‘Right.’

‘Are you ready to start?’

‘Yeah.’

He signalled Dr Kamara to go ahead, and the near-darkness of the room slowly began to lift.

It wasn’t anything like I’d imagined . . .

It wasn’t anything like I could have imagined.

It was infinitely worse.

Unimaginable.

The stuff inside your body doesn’t look anything like those see-through illustrations of the human body you see in biology textbooks, or those plastic anatomy models with their nice neat innards, all in exactly the right place. That’s not how it is. In reality, it’s just a jumbled mess of soggy red stuff and thick globs of meat, all shoved together in whatever way they’ll fit. And it’s not inanimate either. It’s a living thing, a mess that moves – pumping, pulsing, throbbing, twitching . . . keeping itself alive.

I know it for what it is now.

But back then . . .

All I could see was a repulsive stew of guts.

Entrails . . .

Sickening coils of intestine, knotted together, fold upon fold, like parasitic worms . . .

Tubes, greyed pink, the colour of rotted meat.

Foul things.

Too much.

‘Stop,’ I said.

8

I came very close to putting a stop to everything then. I’d had enough. My brain was too scrambled to think anymore, and all I could feel – physically and emotionally – was a numbing cold sickness that felt like the end of the world.

I wanted to be left alone now. I wanted to lie in the darkness and not think or feel anything at all. I wanted to empty myself of everything and float off to a place where things were still all right.

But I knew that I couldn’t.

Not yet anyway.

Not until I’d seen the skull in the mirror.

‘I’d strongly advise against it,’ Dr Hahn told me. ‘You’re already highly distressed – understandably so – and another major shock to your system now could have very serious consequences. On the other hand . . .’ She paused, her eyes fixed on me, her lips pursed in thought. ‘I completely understand why you need to do this – if I was in your position I’d feel the same – and it doesn’t make any difference what I say to you anyway, does it?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve already made up your mind.’

I nodded.

‘And if we don’t do it now, you’ll find a way to do it on your own later on.’

‘It’s my face . . . my head. It’s me. I can’t not know it.’

The only time I cried during the whole revelation was when Dr Kamara told me that I’d lost all my hair. And by lost she meant lost. Not just transparent, but gone . . . every last bit of it. For some reason – which they still didn’t understand – it had all fallen out when I’d been half crazy with sickness and pain.

Dr Kamara told me this before I’d looked in the mirror, and I know it might seem like a strange thing to warn me about – that having no hair should be the least of my worries – and from the look Dr Reynolds gave her when she told me, a puzzled frown, it was perfectly clear that he didn’t get it. But Dr Kamara knew what she was doing. She knew that the shock of losing my hair wouldn’t be the same as the shock of everything else. Everything else was extraordinary, impossible, unbelievable. Losing my hair was real. It was something I could understand, something I could have real feelings about . . . feelings that actually made sense.

If Dr Kamara hadn’t warned me in advance, those feelings would have got mixed up with all the unbelievable stuff, and I would have missed the chance to have some true sadness and grieve a little for what I’d lost.

My hair . . .

My lovely, stupid, midnight-black mess of hair.

All gone.

I loved that hair.

I really did.

But even as I sat there crying my eyes out, I couldn’t help wondering how my tears must have looked as they streamed down my skinless face.

They must have planned to show me my head – or at least planned for the possibility – because Dr Hahn just went into the little bathroom and almost immediately came back out again carrying a medium-sized frameless mirror. As she walked back over to the bed, she kept the reflective side facing towards her, and as Dr Reynolds stepped aside to let her stand next to me, she held the mirror close to her body, clutching it almost secretively to her chest, as if my reflection was already in it and she didn’t want me to see it yet.

I know she spoke to me then – I remember seeing her lips move – but I have no idea what she said. All I could hear as she stood there talking to me was a surging roar inside my head and the deafening thump of my heart. Everything else was just a distant drone.

I don’t remember how the mirror came to be in front of me either.

I don’t know if Dr Hahn just gave it to me, and I held it in front of me, or if she positioned it for me and held it herself . . . or if it was all done gradually, revealing my reflection bit by bit, or if there was no hesitation at all, just a straightforward no-nonsense revelation . . .

I have no recollection at all.

I remember the roar in my head . . .

I remember the fear in my heart . . .

And then suddenly I was back home again . . . standing at the bathroom sink, my head crashing with electric madness, staring at the nightmare vision in the mirror.

A skull, skinless . . . white bone, grinning teeth . . .

Eyeless . . .

Faceless . . .

Hairless . . .

A skull, pocked with grey stuff and schemes of blood . . .

A thing of death.

It was me.

I could see the tracks of my tears running from the holes where my eyes used to be, the holes looking back at me like caves of bone. I knew my eyes were still there, but it’s hard to believe in something you can’t see.

I closed them.

Something might have flickered in the mirror, just the tiniest shimmer of unseen movement as my invisible eyelids closed . . . but nothing changed. I still couldn’t see the things I was seeing with.

It was too much.

I didn’t want to see anymore.

I covered my eyes with my hands, desperate for the sanctuary of darkness, but all I got was a blurred transparency of finger bones and muscle and blood. The skull in the mirror was still there, still grinning at me through the glaze of my see-through hands . . . and I knew that I didn’t have to keep looking at it, that all I had to do was turn my head and look away, but no matter how much I wanted to – and in that moment I’d never wanted anything more – I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel, couldn’t speak . . .

Kenzie?

A voice from a million miles away.

Kenzie!

Your face is who you are. It’s your identity, the thing that makes you you. It’s how you see yourself . . . which is kind of strange, if you think about it, because your face is one of the few parts of your body that you can’t actually see, and the only way you know it is through the second-hand imagery of other things – mirrors, photographs, videos . . .

But it’s still how you see yourself. And it’s how everyone else sees you and knows you too. Your face is you. And because you see it so many times every day – and you’ve been seeing it every day for most of your life – you know it more intimately than anything else. You know every millimetre of it – every line, every turn, every shape . . . the way it all fits together. You know it so well, and it means so much to you, that if it changes in any way at all, you’re instantly and intensely aware of it. And if that change is enough to disturb the familiarity of your face – and it doesn’t take much to do it – the effect can be staggering.

The thing that’s you, and has always been you, has suddenly become something else. It’s not you anymore . . .

That you has gone.

And now you’ve become this . . .

This fucking thing.

I hit it.

My head cracked.

And then I was nothing.

9

They kept me in the special care room for another two days – the lights permanently dimmed, my body covered up, a sleep mask for sanctuary when I needed it.

‘We’ll move you to a recovery room soon,’ Dr Kamara told me. ‘You’ll be a lot more comfortable there. We just want to make sure there’s nothing else wrong with you first, so we need to keep you hooked up to all the equipment in here for a little while longer.’

I think there was probably a bit more to it than that. I think part of the reason they wanted to keep me under observation in the special care room was so that they could monitor and assess how I was coping – or not – with the shock, and they didn’t want to move me until they were sure I was relatively stable.

I don’t know how I was coping with the shock, to be honest. I remember bits and pieces of the days after the revelation, and some of the memories are all too vivid, but a lot of that time is completely lost to me. I don’t know if I’ve blocked it out, or if I was so traumatised that I never even registered it in the first place. It’s also quite possible that the reason I don’t remember much is that I spent most of the time asleep.

Reasons . . .

Reasons don’t matter.

‘We think it’s best if you don’t have any visitors just yet,’ Dr Kamara said. ‘You need as much peace and quiet as you can get. We’ve talked this over with your dad, and although he’s very keen to see you as soon as possible, he understands that the only thing that matters at the moment is doing what’s best for you. So we’ll give it a couple of days, then hopefully get you into a recovery room and see how it goes from there.’

‘So when will I see Dad?’

‘It’s hard to say. We’d like to keep you fully rested for at least another three or four days –’

‘What about this?’ I muttered, indicating my head, my face. ‘I can’t let Dad see me like this . . .’

‘He’s already seen you, Kenzie. He knows –’

‘When did he see me?’

‘The day after you were brought here.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘You wouldn’t. You were in a bad way at the time – you weren’t really aware of anything – and your dad didn’t stay long anyway. He had to get back to look after your brother.’

‘Was I like this when he saw me?’ I asked. ‘Was I . . . you know . . . ?’

‘The transparency hadn’t fully set in at that point. It was still fading in and out, so you weren’t permanently affected when he saw you, but he knows what’s happened to you, Kenzie. He’s seen how you are. He knows –’

‘I’ll have to cover my face when I see him . . . my head . . . all of it . . .’

‘You don’t have to hide anything from him. He’s your dad . . . he’ll understand.’

‘Some kind of veil might do it . . . a niqab maybe, or even a burqa . . .’ I looked at Dr Kamara. ‘Are you allowed to wear stuff like that if you’re not a Muslim?’

She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Could you find out?’

She just looked at me then, and for a moment I sensed a slight coldness to her.

‘I think you’d better get some rest now,’ she said.

‘But what about –?’

‘I’ve got your clothes here,’ she said, holding up a bulging carrier bag. ‘Burgess Park General just sent them on to us. You need to keep your gown on for now though. You can get changed when you move to the recovery room. Your dad’s going to bring you some more things when he comes – clothes, toiletries, books . . . whatever you need. Is there anything in particular you want him to bring?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, just let us know if you think of anything.’ She leaned down and placed the bag of clothes on the bottom shelf of a monitor stand just to the right of the bed. ‘I’ll leave this here, okay?’

I nodded.

She studied me for a few seconds, and I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just turned round, went over to the door, and left.

Reasons . . .

The why of things.

One of the things about dressing the same way nearly all the time is that you can always be pretty sure what you were wearing on any given day. It’s a fairly useless thing to know, and all it really meant that day was that as I lay there staring at the carrier bag, I automatically knew what was in it. The clothes I’d been wearing on that rain-sodden Sunday night would have been the same kind of clothes I always wore – black leggings, black skirt, black T-shirt, black hoodie, my favourite silver and black pumps. I also knew that when I was taken to BPG my phone was in the pocket of my hoodie. Whether it was still there or not was another question, and at first I couldn’t have cared less. What did I want with a phone? I was hardly going to take a selfie and post it on Instagram, was I? And whatever anyone might be saying about me on Snapchat or yapTee or Facebook . . . well, I was feeling bad enough as it was. Why would I want to read a load of stuff that was guaranteed to make me feel even worse?

Was there anyone I wanted to call?

No.

Not even Finch?

I felt tears in my eyes then.

Of course I wanted to talk to Finch . . . there was nothing I wanted more. But I knew what would happen if I did. I knew I’d start sobbing my heart out the moment I heard his voice, and that once the tears had begun to flow, I wouldn’t be able to stop them. And all that would do was make us both feel worse. Finch would be upset because I was upset, and that would make me more upset, which in turn would make Finch more upset . . .

No.

I couldn’t speak to him . . . not yet, anyway.

But maybe . . .

I gazed down at the carrier bag.

Could I text him?

I thought about it . . .

It’s Finch, I told myself. You don’t need to think about texting Finch. Just do it.

I thought about it some more . . .

There was a good chance my phone wasn’t in the bag anyway. Someone could have found it – a nurse, a doctor, a paramedic – and put it away for safe keeping, or it could have just fallen out of my pocket somewhere . . . and if the phone wasn’t there, there was nothing to think about, was there? So I might as well have a look . . .

As I reached down for the bag – taking care not to pull out any of the tubes and wires attached to various parts of my body – I knew in my heart that I wanted the phone to be there, and I knew that I was going to text Finch if it was.

It was.

And I did.

When I opened the phone I saw that there was a message from Finch from three days ago.

hey kez, i’m here if you want to talk, but don’t worry if you don’t. i’m here for you anyway xxx

Even that was almost enough to break my heart.

I waited for the tingle to leave my eyes, then wrote back.

hi finch, how’s it going? sorry i didn’t write sooner, didn’t have my phone. are you ok? xxx

He replied almost immediately.

kenzie!! ha! my favourite big sis! i knew i’d hear from you this morning, I just KNEW it. i could feel it in the air

Then me.

how are you? everything ok?

Finch.

everything’s fine. but what about you? what’s going on, kez? are you all right?

Me.

not really

Finch.

is there anything i can do? do you want to talk about it?

Me.

not yet. maybe later. is that ok?

Finch.

no prob. whenever you’re ready. i’ll be here

Me.

thanks. i’ve got to go now. tired

Finch.

ok

Me.

love you xxx

Reasons . . .

I shouldn’t have sent that last message. Finch never liked it when I told him I loved him. He thought it was a bad omen, like saying a final goodbye. It made him think he was about to die.

Reasons don’t matter.

10

I’d kept myself covered up since the revelation – gown, long gloves, long socks – and I hadn’t looked at myself once. I hadn’t even taken a quick peek at anything in the hope that the transparency had gone and everything was back to normal again . . . I knew it wasn’t. I could feel it. And I knew that not looking at it wouldn’t make it go away, or make it any better . . . in fact, it might even make things worse.

But I just couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t face the hideous reality of what I’d become.

So for two days I just lay there in bed, cocooned in white in the dim grey light of the room, letting myself drift into a mindless nowhere. But then on the morning of the third day – I had no idea what day it actually was – everything became real again. I was told I was being moved to the recovery room, and that it had been decided that Dad could visit me today. It seemed a bit sudden – I was sure it was sooner than Dr Kamara had led me to believe – and I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t been asked if it was okay with me, but I didn’t say anything. Dad was going to be here at twelve o’clock, and while he was here Dr Reynolds would be sitting down with both of us to discuss my condition in detail. And that was that.

Goodbye, mindless nowhere.

Hello reality.

It wasn’t far to the recovery room. Just along a short corridor, through a secured door, then left into another corridor, and the room was tucked away at the end of a little passageway. When I got out of bed I could hardly stand up at first, let alone walk. My legs just weren’t used to it. Dr Kamara told me not to worry, that it was only to be expected after a long stay in bed, and it wasn’t a problem anyway because all I had to do was get myself into the wheelchair she’d brought with her, and she’d do the rest. I’m not sure why I wouldn’t even contemplate using the wheelchair – although I suppose it’s possible that it had something to do with Finch – but my strength of feeling must have been obvious, because Dr Kamara didn’t bother trying to change my mind. And once I’d been on my feet for a few minutes, leaning against the bed for support, my legs didn’t feel quite so wobbly anyway. I still had to stop a few times on the way to the recovery room – it felt as if I was climbing a mountain – and the two-minute journey must have taken at least fifteen minutes, but I got there in the end, and I managed to make it without falling over.

The corridors were deserted.

No doctors, no nurses, no porters . . .

No sign of anyone at all.

No windows either.

And the only thing I could hear was a faint humming sound that seemed to be coming from behind the walls.

The recovery room was nice enough. It had a small settee and a matching armchair, a table and chairs, a few cupboards, a flat screen TV, and a proper little bed (not a hospital bed). The floor was carpeted, and there was a separate bathroom (with a bath and a shower). And on the far side of the room there was a window. It was fitted with a blackout blind to keep out the daylight, and when Dr Kamara had first shown me inside, the blind was down and the room was so dark that she’d had to turn on the lights to show me around. The lights were controlled by a dimmer switch.

‘Your dad will be here at twelve,’ Dr Kamara reminded me. ‘We’ll bring him straight here when he arrives, okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is there anything you need before I go?’

Yeah, I thought, I need to not be here, I need to not be a monster, I need my ordinary life back . . . my shitty old ordinary life . . .

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I told her.

I don’t get people sometimes. I don’t understand how their minds work. Take Dr Kamara, for instance. I’d thought at first that she was the most compassionate of the three doctors, the most perceptive, the one with the most understanding. But when I’d asked her about niqabs and burqas that time – whether or not non-Muslims could wear them – I got the impression that I’d offended her in some way, and the only explanation I could think of was that she’d thought I was only asking her because I’d assumed she was a Muslim, and that I’d based that assumption purely on her appearance and the fact that she had an ‘Asian-sounding’ name. Either that or she was a Muslim, and the idea of me wearing a niqab or a burqa was somehow offensive to her faith.

Whatever the reason, I just didn’t get it.

I didn’t say anything though. And I didn’t mention niqabs or burqas again either.

But that didn’t mean I’d changed my mind.

I still wasn’t going to let my dad see my skull.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to put Dad through the ordeal of trying to pretend that his daughter wasn’t repulsive, or that I didn’t want him to be so traumatised that he wouldn’t be able to cope with things anymore – although, for Finch’s sake, that was something I was desperate to avoid – I also had my own selfish reasons for not wanting Dad to see my faceless face. It felt bad enough knowing how I looked to the doctors, but they were doctors, and although they still couldn’t help staring at me now and then – their professional integrity overcome by the sheer freakishness of my condition – they were, for the most part, as restrained and objective as they could be. They were doctors, and for some reason we’ll reveal things to doctors that we wouldn’t dream of sharing with anyone else.

But my dad wasn’t a doctor.

He was my dad.

And I knew he wouldn’t be able to hide his repulsion if he saw the horror of my see-through head . . . and I didn’t think I could live with that. I mean, imagine how you’d feel if your dad (or your mum) were so revolted by your appearance that they couldn’t look at you without grimacing in disgust . . .

It would tear you apart, wouldn’t it?

It would turn your world upside down.

‘You can get changed now if you want,’ Dr Kamara told me, putting the carrier bag full of clothes on the settee. ‘You don’t have to,’ she added. ‘You can wait until your dad’s brought some fresh clothes if you want, or if you feel more comfortable keeping the gown on . . . it’s entirely up to you.’

It wasn’t a difficult decision to make. I knew that nothing could make me look normal, but there were still certain things that could make me look a tiny bit less abnormal.

There was nothing normal about the gown.

There was something normal about my clothes.

I turned the lights down low, then went over and sat down on the settee next to the carrier bag. I wasn’t looking forward to getting changed – it meant exposing my body again, and even in the lowest light I was still going to see stuff I didn’t want to see – and for a moment or two I wondered if I could do it with the sleep mask on. It would obviously be quite awkward, but it certainly wasn’t impossible. The only thing was . . .

It didn’t feel right.

I shouldn’t have to be scared of myself.

And even if I was, I didn’t have to be so pathetic about it.

I picked up the carrier bag, placed it on my knees, and reached inside.

The first thing I pulled out was something that shouldn’t have been there. When I’d taken my phone out of my hoodie pocket the other day, the hoodie had been at the top of the bag, and I’d put it back in the same place. But now there was something else on top of it, and I knew it wasn’t mine. It was a smallish polythene bag, and inside it was a pair of sunglasses and a folded-up headscarf. The sunglasses were fashionably large, the kind that celebrities wear, and the lenses were really dark. The headscarf was made from some kind of silky black material.

Dr Kamara . . .

The sunglasses and scarf had to be from Dr Kamara.

Maybe I hadn’t offended after all . . . or maybe I had, but she’d forgiven me. Or maybe it was just me . . .

I don’t get people.

I really don’t.

I opened up the headscarf and held it out in front of me. I didn’t know if it was a hijab or just an ordinary headscarf – I didn’t know the difference, to be honest – but it didn’t matter. It was easily big enough to cover my whole head. And the sunglasses would cover my eyeless eyes.

Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, looking myself over for about the hundredth time. From the neck down, I looked just about normal – pumps, leggings, skirt, T-shirt, hoodie. The only slight oddity was the white gloves on my hands and the white socks on my feet. From the neck up though, I didn’t look normal at all. I’d never even tried on a headscarf before, let alone had to cover my entire head with one, and it wasn’t just a matter of making sure that everything was covered up either. I had to make sure that it stayed covered up, which meant working out how to wrap the scarf round my head in such a way that it wouldn’t come undone.

It took quite a while, but I got there in the end.

And when I put the sunglasses on and pulled up my hood, tightening the drawstring to fix it firmly around my wrapped-up face, every inch of my see-through head was safely hidden from sight.

I looked ridiculous.

But that was okay.

It was the price I had to pay for not looking hideous.

I took out my phone and checked the time. It was 11.46. Not long to go now. As I went back into the room and sat down on the settee, I could feel my heart thumping against my ribs.

11

Dad was never the same after Mum died. It’s hard to explain how he changed – partly because I can’t really remember how he was before, so I don’t have anything to compare him to, and partly because it was the kind of change that’s very easy to hide. Outwardly he barely changed at all. If you’d asked any of his friends to describe him, they’d have told you that apart from the heartache of losing his wife, he was just the same old Barry Clark.

But he wasn’t.

And Finch and I knew it.

We could never quite work out what it was – whether there was something missing from him, or there was something about him that hadn’t been there before – but we knew, without doubt, that it was all about Mum.

She died very suddenly.

Dad always maintained that she was absolutely fine when she went to bed that night. She wasn’t ill – she’d never had a serious illness in her life – and there was nothing to suggest there was anything wrong with her. She looked well. She hadn’t complained of anything – headache, stomach ache, excessive tiredness – she’d just gone to bed in exactly the same way she always did. Setting the alarm for seven-thirty in the morning, reading a book for half an hour, then turning off the light and going to sleep.

Dad said he couldn’t remember who’d turned off the alarm in the morning. He remembered it going off, but he couldn’t recall if Mum had turned it off or if he’d leaned over her and turned it off himself. He thought he must have gone back to sleep again then, because the next thing he knew it was nearly eight o’clock, and if he didn’t get a move on he was going to be late for work. Mum was lying on her side, facing away from him, and he just assumed she was still asleep. It was a Wednesday, Mum’s day off work (she’d set the alarm so she’d be up in time to see us off to school), so Dad decided to let her sleep in.

We were all a bit late that morning, so when Dad told us that Mum was having a lie-in, we were too busy rushing around to give it any thought. All we were thinking about was getting our stuff ready and grabbing something to eat and – in Dad’s case – guzzling down a cup of coffee and trying to find his car keys.

Dad and Finch left the house first (Dad was dropping him off at school on his way to work), and I left a few minutes later. It wasn’t until I’d got to the bus stop that I realised I hadn’t said goodbye to Mum. None of us had. But I told myself it was okay. She was having a lie-in, wasn’t she? It wouldn’t have been fair to wake her up just to say goodbye.

If only I’d known . . .

If only.

Dad and Finch usually got home before me, but that day Dad was taking Finch to the opticians after school, so I got home first. The house was quiet. I called out to Mum – but only in a casual are-you-there? kind of way – and when she didn’t answer, I didn’t think anything of it. She’d either gone out somewhere or she was upstairs in the bathroom or her bedroom. I didn’t bother calling out again. I was going upstairs anyway – I needed to use the bathroom – so I’d soon find out if she was up there. And if she wasn’t, she wasn’t . . .

It was no big deal.

Nothing to worry about.

The bathroom was at the far end of the landing, and Mum and Dad’s bedroom was halfway along, and as I headed along the landing towards the bathroom I was slightly surprised to see that their bedroom door was shut. They usually only closed it at night . . .

I nearly didn’t do anything.

It was only a closed door . . .

There was probably a perfectly reasonable explanation for it.

I very nearly just walked on past and carried on heading for the bathroom.

But I didn’t.

I don’t know what it was that made me stop. Just a feeling, perhaps . . . an instinctive sense that something was wrong . . .

I don’t know.

I called out to her again – ‘Mum?’ – and although I tried to sound as carefree as possible, as if somehow that would make everything okay, my voice sounded strained. I cleared my throat, stepped closer to the door, and tried again . . . louder this time – ‘Mum! Are you in there? MUM!’ – not caring anymore how I sounded, just desperate for Mum to reply.

But she didn’t.

I gave it one last go, this time knocking hard on the door as well as calling her name, but even as I was doing it I knew in my heart it was a waste of time. I knew what I had to do. And I knew I just had to do it.

I reached for the handle, opened the door, and stepped through into the bedroom.

The curtains were closed.

Mum was in bed.

She was lying on her side, under the duvet, her head just visible, facing away from me . . .

Very quiet, very still.

‘Mum?’ I said softly.

Nothing.

I couldn’t move . . . I didn’t want to move. As long as I stayed where I was – just inside the doorway – I wasn’t close enough to the bed to see Mum’s face, and if I couldn’t see her face, I wouldn’t know for sure why she was just lying there like that . . .

I didn’t want to know.

If I didn’t know, it couldn’t hurt me.

I stood there barely breathing for maybe a minute or so, hoping against hope that if I kept perfectly still and didn’t make a sound I’d hear something familiar in that unearthly silence – a breath, a cough, a sniff, a sigh . . . anything at all . . .

There was nothing.

Something made me move then. Something . . . I don’t know what it was. What makes you do anything? My mind had shut down now, and as I crossed over to the bed I wasn’t thinking or feeling anything. It was as if I was set on automatic – just walking, moving, doing what I was doing . . . moving round the foot of the bed . . . then along the side where Mum was lying . . . seeing her head on the pillow . . . seeing her face . . . her lifeless eyes, staring at nothing . . .

I collapsed then, slumping down onto the bed, and I took her in my arms and held her tightly, cradling her head to my chest.

She was horribly cold . . .

Cold and stiff.

Whenever I think of Mum now, that’s what I remember – that terrible cold deadness. I feel it in the palms of my hands.

The doctor who examined Mum’s body couldn’t confirm a cause of death, and when the coroner ordered a post-mortem, the pathologist didn’t find anything either. No heart problems, no cancer, no blood clots . . . no drugs, no alcohol, no poison . . . nothing at all that could have led to her death. I remember someone saying at the time that ‘it was as if her life was just suddenly switched off’. The only thing the post-mortem established was that Mum probably died some time between one o’clock and eight o’clock that morning.

The coroner opened an inquest into Mum’s death, and during the investigation we were all asked lots of questions. Dad was also interviewed by the police, both at home and at the police station.

The inquest took a long time, but in the end it all came to nothing. There was still no reasonable explanation for Mum’s death. No one could say how she died, or why, and the coroner had to return an open verdict. The cause of death was officially recorded as ‘unknown’.

There were a lot of things I didn’t understand at the time – and even now I’m not sure I know the whole story – and I didn’t (and still don’t) fully understand how some of these things affected Dad. I know he was really angry about the police getting involved – he flatly refused to even speak to them at first – and it was around that time that he had a blazing row with Nan, my mum’s mother. I found out later what it was all about, but all I knew then was that he’d banned her from our house, and Finch and I weren’t allowed to see her anymore.

There was a period when I think Dad blamed himself for Mum’s death. If only he’d checked on her that morning, if only he hadn’t left without saying goodbye, if only . . . if only . . . if only . . .

But at some point, I think he stopped feeling guilty. I could be wrong, of course – it wouldn’t be the first time – but as time went on, and things kept going from bad to worse, I got the feeling that Dad started blaming Mum for everything. He never actually said as much, but by this time he very rarely spoke about her anyway. If me or Finch asked him something about her – or even just mentioned her – his face would go blank, and he’d either just walk away or change the subject and carry on as if nothing had happened.

On the day after the first anniversary of her death, he went round the house collecting all her stuff together – clothes, books, jewellery, shoes, boxes full of old photographs . . . anything that was hers and hers alone – then he loaded it all up in the car and drove off without telling us where he was going. When he got back home, the car was empty.

I really don’t know what was going on his head, but there were times when the truth was so clear in his eyes that his feelings about Mum were unquestionable.

It was all her fault.

If she hadn’t died, he wouldn’t have been maligned and humiliated by the police, and he wouldn’t have had to waste his time dealing with Nan, and he wouldn’t have had to sacrifice everything now that Finch was so ill . . . he wouldn’t have had to give up his job, and he wouldn’t have had to dedicate his whole life to caring for his son . . .

And now here I was, adding yet another burden to his shoulders, and giving him yet another thing to blame on Mum.

But, like I said, I could be wrong.

And even if I’m not, you can’t help how you feel, can you? Wherever your thoughts and feelings come from – your heart, your mind, your soul – it’s just as much beyond your control as everything else that makes you what you are. Blood, enzymes, hormones, proteins, cells, organs, neurochemicals . . .

You don’t control any of it.

It controls you.

12

Dad was late.

It was gone twelve-thirty when he finally arrived – a hesitant knock on the door, a muttered voice – ‘Kenzie? It’s me . . .’ – and as I got up from the settee, intending to let him in, the door opened just enough for him to poke his head through.

‘All right if I come in?’ he said.

He was doing his best to smile at me, and I knew it was a genuine attempt rather than something he was forcing himself to do, but he just didn’t have it in him. As he stepped through the door and closed it behind him, I could see the turmoil in his eyes and the nervous hesitancy in his movement, and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Imagine how he must have felt – facing up to his mutant daughter, her disfigurement hidden beneath a ludicrous disguise . . . not knowing what to do, or what to say, or where to look, or how to feel . . .

Who wouldn’t be bewildered by all that?

He was carrying a holdall in his hand, and as he turned from the door and started speaking to me he couldn’t stop fidgeting around with it – swinging it against his leg, twisting the hand straps, bobbing it up and down . . .

‘I’m sorry I’m late, Kenzie,’ he said. ‘We’ve been having a lot of problems with the carers, something to do with their shift patterns or something, and then when I did get going there was an accident on the A13 –’

‘It’s all right, Dad,’ I told him. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Where do you want this?’ he said, holding up the bag. ‘It’s your clothes and stuff, books, soap, toothbrush . . . I wasn’t sure what to bring . . .’

He was talking too quickly, almost jabbering, and his eyes were all over the place. He kept trying to look at me, but there was nothing of me to see – my face wrapped up, my eyes masked by sunglasses . . . and I realised then that he had no way of knowing how I was. He couldn’t see if I was crying, smiling, angry, sad . . .

But he couldn’t see my faceless skull either.

And that’s how it had to be.

‘Where do you want me to put it?’ he repeated, still holding the bag, his eyes still darting around the room. ‘On the bed?’

‘Yeah, anywhere, Dad . . . it doesn’t matter.’

‘I’ll put it on the bed.’

He went over and put the holdall on the bed, and for a second or two he just stood there, facing away from me, not saying a word. His head was slightly bowed down, as if he was staring at the floor, but after a few moments he slowly straightened up, and then – to my surprise – he turned round, came over to where I was standing, and put his arms around me.

Dad was never any good at hugging. He didn’t like it, didn’t get it, and didn’t do it unless he really had to. And when he did do it, he did it really badly. So although I was surprised when he embraced me, I wasn’t in the least bit surprised at how stiff and awkward it was – his hands barely touching my back, his arms held rigidly, his body arched away from mine. It was like being hugged by a robot.

‘I’m sorry, Kenzie,’ he muttered. ‘I just . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I would have asked him – at least, I think I would – but by the time his words had sunk in, he’d already stopped holding me – if you can call it that – and now he was just pacing aimlessly around the room.

The moment had gone.

There were no more moments in the next half an hour or so. We sat down and talked – Dad in the armchair, me on the settee – but we didn’t really say anything. I asked him about Finch. He told me he’d been having breathing problems again.

‘What kind of problems?’ I asked. ‘The same as before?’

Dad nodded. ‘But it’s lasting longer now. And it’s becoming more regular.’

‘Has Dr Moore seen him?’

Dr Moore was our GP.

‘She came round yesterday.’ Dad shrugged. ‘She said if it keeps getting worse, he might have to start using a ventilator.’

‘Can he do that at home?’

‘He can if we can get hold of one.’

He went on about ventilators for a while – how long it took to get one through the NHS, how much they cost to buy privately – and then he started telling me all about the problems with Finch’s carers, and as he droned on about shift patterns and new working practices, I just sat there, wondering why it had to be like this.

He hadn’t asked me how I was . . . how I was feeling . . . how I was coping with this life-changing nightmare . . .

He hadn’t asked me why I was dressed up like something from a horror film . . . why I felt the need to cover myself up for him . . .

He hadn’t asked me what the hell was going on.

He hadn’t asked me anything.

And I knew that wasn’t right. He was my dad, he was supposed to care for me. He should have been sitting beside me asking me hundreds of questions and telling me that everything was going to be all right. And I knew that I should have been devastated by the fact that he wasn’t . . . and perhaps a tiny part of me was. But for the most part, the overwhelming truth was that I was glad he wasn’t asking me hundreds of questions and pretending that everything was going to be all right . . .

This was how it was with Dad.

It was how it had always been.

And it was okay with me.

13

I’d got the impression from Dr Kamara that Dr Reynolds would be on his own when he met with me and Dad to discuss my condition, so I was a bit surprised when he turned up with Dr Hahn, but only because I wasn’t expecting her. I didn’t mind if she was there or not. Neither of them said anything about my appearance – in fact, they barely gave it a second glance – and I guessed they already knew about the headscarf and sunglasses. Either that or they were really good actors.

Dad was sitting beside me now.

Dr Hahn had pointed out that it would be a lot easier for Dr Reynolds to talk to us if we were both on the settee. So Dad had moved, Dr Reynolds had taken his place in the armchair, and Dr Hahn was sitting at the table. It wasn’t obvious that Dr Hahn was keeping a close eye on Dad – it looked as if she was just sitting there quietly in the background, not doing anything in particular – but I knew she was watching him. There was something in her eyes when she gazed his way that wasn’t there when she looked at Dr Reynolds or me. Dad wasn’t aware of it though. He was just sitting there – his back straight, his hands on his knees, staring blindly at the floor. It must have come across as a strangely inappropriate thing to be doing – and I have to admit it was slightly embarrassing – but I knew Dad couldn’t help it. It was just what he did sometimes when things got too much for him. I thought he might snap out of it when Dr Reynolds began talking to us, but he didn’t.

‘How are you feeling today, Kenzie?’ the doctor said.

‘I’m okay, thanks.’

‘And how do you like it here in your new room? Are you settling in all right?’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘Good.’ He glanced briefly at Dad, got no reaction, and turned back to me. ‘Has your dad told you much about the discussions we’ve already had?’

‘What discussions?’

His eyes flicked over at Dad again, and I could sense his growing annoyance with him.

‘Perhaps ‘discussions’ is the wrong choice of word,’ he said, trying hard to hide his irritation. ‘We’ve been in regular contact with your dad all the time you’ve been here, and we’ve kept him up to date as much as we can. Not just about your condition, but about everything we’re doing as well. And, wherever possible, why we’re doing it. So although we haven’t really discussed anything at length, your dad knows what’s going on.’ He paused for a second, realising what he’d just said – your dad knows what’s going on – and I could see him thinking – not that you’d know it from looking at him now – but he didn’t say anything. He just raised his eyebrows a fraction, then carried on. ‘I was only asking how much your dad has told you so that I know where I stand before I start explaining things further. I’m guessing now though that he hasn’t told you very much. Is that right?’

I nodded. ‘We haven’t had time to talk about anything really.’

‘Well, that’s okay . . . as long as I know.’ He lowered his eyes for a few seconds, gazing thoughtfully at the floor, then he blinked once, tapped his finger on the arm of the chair, and looked back up at me. ‘The only thing I can promise you at the moment, Kenzie, is that we’re all doing our level best to find out what’s wrong with you. It’s an extraordinarily challenging and painstaking process, and I honestly can’t tell you how long it’s going to take. But we’re making good progress, and we’re now beginning to focus most of our attention on one type of disease in particular. And that’s what I want to discuss with you today. All I ask is that you bear in mind that at this point we’re still only speculating.’

I can’t remember everything Dr Reynolds said that day, and I’m not sure I understood it all anyway, but the one thing I don’t have any doubts about now is that although he was almost certainly right, it didn’t – in the end – make the slightest bit of difference.

‘We’re working on the theory that the underlying cause of your condition is a previously unknown genetic disorder,’ he told us. ‘I realise that because of your brother’s muscular dystrophy you already know quite a lot about genetic disorders, so I’m not going to waste your time going over the basics with you, but it’s important to understand that although the fundamental cause of all genetic disorders is the same – that’s to say one or more abnormalities in the genome – the specifics behind the many different types of genetic disease are enormously varied.

‘Take the abnormalities themselves, for example. These can range from mutations in the DNA sequence of a single gene – as is the case in some forms of muscular dystrophy – to changes in the number and structure of entire sets of chromosomes. Some disorders are hereditary, others result from new mutations. And while these disorders are always present at birth, the symptoms of many conditions don’t become apparent until later in life. And these are just some of the variables. There are dozens more.’

Dr Reynolds cleared his throat. ‘So the problem we have, and the reason it’s so difficult to identify the specific cause of any genetic illness, is that unless we already know what we’re looking for, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack the size of a mountain.’

It felt quite strange hearing the words ‘muscular dystrophy’. When Finch was first diagnosed, the doctors weren’t sure which type of the disease he had – there are at least nine different forms of MD – and there was even some doubt as to whether or not it was muscular dystrophy at all. It wasn’t much of a doubt – we were told that the chances of a wrong diagnosis were less than 1% – but it was the only hope we had, and it gave us at least something to cling on to. And I think that was the reason we stopped using the term ‘muscular dystrophy’. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and we weren’t even aware we were doing it at first, but I think we must have had the same irrational inner belief that by referring to the illness as muscular dystrophy we were accepting that that’s what it was. And if we did that we were giving up hope.

So Finch’s illness was just that – his illness. Or his sickness. Or his condition. Anything but muscular dystrophy.

We knew it was ridiculous, of course – as stupidly nonsensical as all superstitions – but the thing about superstitions is that once you start going along with them it’s very hard to stop. You don’t have anything to lose, you keep telling yourself. And you never know, do you? You just never know . . .

‘And there’s one more thing that needs pointing out,’ Dr Reynolds continued. ‘It’s widely acknowledged that the vast majority of our genetic material doesn’t appear to do anything at all. It’s known as junk DNA, and it’s believed to account for as much as ninety-seven per cent of the entire human genome. Now, to me, that makes no sense at all. The human body is a wonderfully efficient organism, and one of the things that makes it so efficient is that every single part of it – every cell, every molecule – has a clearly defined purpose and function. So how is it even conceivable that ninety-seven per cent of our being has no purpose or function whatsoever?’ He looked at me in silence for a few seconds, as if he was expecting an answer, but he’d gone off on such a tangent now that I wasn’t even sure what the question was. ‘The only explanation for junk DNA that’s ever made any sense,’ he went on, ‘is that just because it seems redundant, that doesn’t mean that it is. All it means is that we don’t know what it does. And if we don’t know what ninety-seven per cent of our DNA does, then we also know nothing about its abnormalities and what kind of disorders they might cause.’

Dad wasn’t sitting bolt upright anymore. He’d let himself lean back a bit, so he was resting against the back of the settee, and his hands were together in his lap. He was still not quite there though – still staring at nothing – but I knew the signs, and I knew he was on his way back.

I glanced at Dr Hahn, expecting her to be studying Dad, but her eyes were fixed on me.

She smiled.

It was a smile shaped by pity.

I didn’t like it.

‘Do you know what gene sequencing is?’ Dr Reynolds asked me.

I nodded. ‘Finch had it done. It’s when they take a sample of your DNA and use it to build up a kind of map that shows the details of all your genes, and then they analyse all the details to see if you’ve got any of the genetic faults that cause particular diseases. I mean, I know it’s a lot more complicated than that . . .’

I remembered, I remember . . .

Leaving the hospital with Finch and Dad, the three of us heading across the car park in bewildered silence. We’d just spent an hour with a doctor we’d never met before who was supposed to be giving us the results of Finch’s gene sequencing and telling us what it all meant, but none of us could understand what he was talking about. It wasn’t that he used too much medical jargon or anything, or that we couldn’t understand his accent – he didn’t have one – in fact, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the way he spoke at all. His voice was perfectly clear, the words he used easily understandable, and every time he began a sentence it seemed at first to make sense. But by the time he’d got to the end of it, it had somehow become incomprehensible. And if you told him that you didn’t understand, and asked him to explain it again, exactly the same thing would happen.

It was the weirdest thing.

And by the time we left his office, we were all so dazed and bemused by it that all we could do was walk in stunned silence together – along the hospital corridors, through the hospital doors, across the hospital car park . . .

We were nearly at the car, and Dad was just getting the keys out of his pocket, when Finch broke the silence.

‘Imagine serving him at McDonald’s,’ he said. ‘You’d be there for ever, wouldn’t you?’

We all pictured it for a moment – the doctor ordering something, the server not understanding, the doctor repeating it, the server still not understanding – and then I turned to Finch and saw the big stupid smile on his face, and that was it. We both just cracked up, laughing away like idiots, and once we’d started we couldn’t stop – snorting and hooting and giggling, falling about all over the place . . . we laughed so hard it hurt. It was so infectious that even Dad joined in after a while, and when we finally managed to control ourselves – our bellies still sore from laughing, our eyes still wet with tears – there was a moment when we were all together again . . . the three of us just standing there smiling at each other, not thinking, not worrying, not anything . . .

It was as happy as we were ever going to be.

14

‘We don’t usually carry out gene sequencing on our patients unless there’s a strong indication that their disease is genetic,’ Dr Reynolds said. ‘And of course we’ll always consider it for a patient who’s tested negative for everything else. But in your case, Kenzie, your condition was so extraordinary that we decided to start testing you for everything straight away, including genetic disorders.’

He went quiet for a few moments then, and from the way he looked away from me, focusing on something across the room, I thought he was bracing himself to give me some bad news. But either he changed his mind, or I was wrong in the first place.

‘As you know,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘genetic disorders can be hereditary, passed down from the parents’ genes. Some disorders only affect males, some only females, and others can affect both. Similarly, some conditions can only be inherited from the mother’s side, and others can only come from the father. So in cases like yours, when there are so many unknowns, it’s sometimes possible to narrow things down by looking into the patient’s family history. It’s a time-consuming process, and it often proves fruitless anyway, but as soon as we began asking questions about your family, we knew we might be onto something.’

‘Because of Finch, you mean?’ I said.

‘Well, we were reasonably confident there was no direct correlation between your condition and your brother’s, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was no connection at all. And because Finch had already had his DNA sequenced, all we had to do was get hold of the results and start looking for anything that might possibly relate to you.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘It’s complicated . . .’

Everything, it seemed, was complicated.

‘I’m not trying to be evasive, Kenzie,’ Dr Reynolds explained. ‘It’s just that everything will make a lot more sense once I’ve told you about your grandmother and your mum. So if you’ll let me –’

‘What’s my mum got to do with it?’

He was just about to answer when Dad suddenly leaned forward on the settee, taking us both by surprise. It gave Dr Hahn a bit of a start too. We all turned to look at him, our heads moving in unison, and when I saw Dad sitting there – perched alertly on the edge of the settee, staring hard at Dr Reynolds – I knew he was back.

‘I told you already,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anything to do with that woman.’

He was definitely back.

Sometimes it was easier when he was gone.

‘That woman’ was Nan, my grandmother. Elsa Forde. Dad never called her by name. She was always ‘that woman’ to him.

She was blind.

‘We’ve spoken to her GP and her ophthalmologist,’ Dr Reynolds said, ‘and there seems to be some uncertainty around the precise cause of her blindness. Some of her symptoms are indicative of a condition called Fuchs’ disease, or Fuch’s corneal dystrophy, but she also has symptoms that aren’t typical of Fuchs’.’

‘What’s any of this got to do with Kenzie?’ Dad said. ‘She’s not blind, is she?’

I’m not sure why I didn’t say anything then. It might have been that I didn’t want to agitate Dad any further, and I knew that if I told him that actually I had lost my sight for a while, it wouldn’t just make him look a bit stupid, it would also make him think that I was somehow siding with Nan, and that was something I’d learned to avoid a long time ago. Or it might have been something else that stopped me from saying anything about my temporary blindness. It might have been that at times I was finding it hard to distinguish between the weird stuff I’d actually been through and the weird stuff I’d just dreamed or imagined, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself by claiming I’d been blind when in fact I’d only dreamed it. But from the knowing glance that Dr Reynolds gave me – as if to say, ‘Keep it to yourself for now,’ – I guessed I hadn’t dreamed it after all. Unless, of course, I was still dreaming now . . .

There were brief moments in those early days when I thought it all had to be a dream. I’d look at myself, see the stuff of myself – guts, bone, muscle – and I’d know it was impossible. This . . . this thing, this mutant body . . . it just couldn’t be. It had to be a dream . . . a nightmare . . . it had to be.

But I never believed it for more than a moment.

You can think things are real when you’re dreaming, but it doesn’t work the other way round. You can wish for your reality to be a dream, and you can live out those wishes in books and films, but in reality – the real reality – you can’t mistake anything for a dream.

‘At the moment, Mr Clark,’ Dr Reynolds said calmly, ‘all we’re trying to do is examine the possibility that there might be a hereditary factor to Kenzie’s condition, and in order to do that thoroughly we have to consider every possible connection, no matter how unrelated it might seem. For example, there’s no obvious link between your mother-in-law’s blindness and Kenzie’s condition, but despite the uncertainty over the cause of her blindness, it’s clearly a genetic disorder of some kind, and – more to the point – it’s a disorder that affects the cornea. Do you know what that is?’

Dad just shrugged.

Dr Reynolds looked at me.

‘It’s the front part of your eye,’ I said. ‘The outer layer of it.’

He nodded. ‘And do you know what distinguishes it from almost every other part of the human body?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s one of the only two parts that are transparent . . . the other one being the lens.’

As he paused for a few moments to let that sink in, the silence seemed to hang in the air, as if it too was trying to weigh up the significance of the doctor’s words.

‘There’s also the fact that the cornea transmits and focuses light into the eye,’ he went on. ‘And while that’s not directly comparable to the way in which Kenzie’s transparency is affected by light, both processes share the same fundamental principle of human cells interacting with light.’

‘But what does that mean?’ Dad said. ‘Are you saying that –?’

‘We don’t know what it means yet, Mr Clark. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It might be nothing, it might be something. And it might just be the key to finding out what’s wrong with your daughter. And I’m sure you’ll agree that’s the only thing that matters.’

‘Of course,’ Dad said.

Of course.

The sequencing and analysis of Nan’s DNA was still in its early stages, Dr Reynolds explained. Part of the reason for the delay was that he’d assumed, given the genetic nature of her blindness, that Nan’s genome would already have been sequenced, and it had taken a while to find out that for some reason it hadn’t. It had also taken a while to realise that there was no communication between Dad and her, so she had to be contacted directly.

Dad had given his consent for gene sequencing to be carried out on himself as well as me, and although there was still a lot of work to be done, the basic analysis of both sets of results had already been completed. He’d also agreed to Dr Reynolds request to sequence my mum’s DNA.

I didn’t want to know how that had been done.

I didn’t want to know that her DNA had been extracted from tissue samples that had been retained after her post-mortem.

I didn’t want to know . . .

‘Is there anything in Mum’s DNA that shows why she died?’ I said.

‘We haven’t found any known abnormalities,’ Dr Reynolds told me. ‘What we have found though . . .’ He paused, frowning, scratching his head. ‘This is very difficult to explain . . . in fact, to be perfectly honest with you, we’re still struggling to understand it ourselves. All we really know at the moment is that four out of the five genomes we’re working on share a very distinctive abnormality that, as far as we can tell, has never been seen before. In all four cases it’s located in the same segment of so-called junk DNA, and the structure and form of the four mutations is very nearly identical. However . . .’

‘Whose is the fifth genome?’ I asked him. ‘The one without this abnormality?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have made that clearer. The four linked genomes are yours, your brother’s, your nan’s, and your mum’s. Your dad’s sequencing hasn’t revealed anything.’

I looked at Dad.

He shrugged, his face blank.

There was something in his eyes though, something vaguely familiar, and as he looked away from me – possibly trying to hide it – I wondered if he was beginning to feel a twisted sense of vindication. There was nothing wrong with his DNA, was there? If inherited genes were to blame for his children’s sickness, they hadn’t come from him, had they? And if they’d come from Mum, and they’d maybe even been the cause of her death, who had she inherited them from? Her mother, of course. Who else?

Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe Dad wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. Maybe he was just broken . . .

Messed up.

Incapable.

Bereft.

What did I know?

‘The differences in each of the four abnormalities are minuscule,’ Dr Reynolds continued. ‘In fact, they’re so minute – and so seemingly inconsequential – that they’re very easy to overlook. But once we began looking into them, it gradually became apparent that these almost imperceptible variations could be the answer to everything. We still don’t know exactly what they are, or how they function, but we’re reasonably confident now that these small variations create some kind of link between their parent abnormality and the gene variant that causes the relevant disorder. So in your nan’s case, the unknown mutation is linked to the variant that causes her blindness, and with Finch it’s linked to the abnormality responsible for his MD. We also think it’s possible that these links have something to do with the irregularities in the presentation of both disorders.’

‘What about my mum?’ I asked. ‘What’s this unknown abnormality linked to in her case?’

‘We don’t know yet. We’re still looking.’

‘And if you find it . . . will that tell us what killed her?’

‘If the coupling of her variants is consistent with the pattern in the other two genomes – and we’re fairly sure that it is – then the link should lead us to an abnormality that causes some kind of genetic disorder. Whether or not that turns out to be the direct cause of your mum’s death . . . well, we won’t know that until we find it. And even then, there’s no guarantee of an answer.’

From the way he looked at me then – his gaze direct and purposeful – I knew he was telling me something. And it wasn’t hard to guess what it was. Why he didn’t just come out and say it, I really don’t know. And as he sat there looking at me, clearly expecting me to take the initiative, I felt a flutter of resentment – and perhaps even anger – rising in my heart. But it only lasted a moment. I didn’t have the will or the energy to care about meaningless things.

‘The same goes for me, doesn’t it?’ I said to him. ‘Even if you find the link, there’s no guarantee that it’ll be the direct cause of my transparency. And even if it is, there’s no guarantee it’ll make any difference. Genetic disorders can’t be cured, can they?’

‘Well, there’s been some success with experimental gene therapy treatment, but you’re right – there’s no cure for the vast majority of genetic disorders. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done. In lots of cases it’s possible to treat and manage the symptoms of the disease . . .’

I don’t remember the rest of it. I think I’d reached a kind of saturation point, and my head was so full of abnormalities and variants and genes and disorders and DNA sequencing and god-knows-what else that I simply couldn’t take in any more, and something in my mind – some kind of safety mechanism – just shut everything down.

And I zoned out.

Just like Dad.

Only no one could see that I wasn’t there.

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